Scottish Rugby Union President Ian Barr has led the tributes to Ron Evans, one of the club game’s great stalwarts, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 75.

Evans was a tireless champion of the sport at all levels for over half a century as a writer, broadcaster, administrator and owner of Rerite Sports results service. He suffered a serious heart attack last year and although his initial recovery had been promising, there was subsequent complications. He died peacefully in hospital after a fall last week.

A proud son of Ayr, Evans was a knowledgeable and diligent local rugby reporter for the Ayrshire Post and Ayr Advertiser from the mid-1970s onwards, a correspondent for West Sound radio station from the early 1980s, part of the media and commercial operation for Glasgow Caledonians (as the city’s professional club was then known) in the late 1990s, and also launched Rerite Sport around that time.

It was the last of these roles which really established Evans as arguably the most well-connected figure in Scottish rugby. It involved him and his team collecting and compiling every rugby result in the country on any given Saturday afternoon for clients ranging from national and local newspapers to the Scottish Rugby Union.

This required Evans to cultivate a vast network of contacts from across the club landscape, and the strong personal relationships he fostered was reflected in the warm tributes sent his way on social media yesterday by fellow print and broadcast journalists, former internationalists, club committee members, official club accounts, and casual supporters of the game.

“Ron’s passing is a huge loss personally and a major blow to Scottish club rugby,” said Barr. “I count him as a very good friend, who was a great supporter of my club, Lasswade, as we climbed through the leagues a few years back. He knew the game inside out and always had its best interests at heart, so he was a great sounding board.

“His work ethic was unbelievable. He had a couple of assistants, but in my experience it would invariably be his voice on the other end of the line each Saturday evening looking for that afternoon’s result. And I don’t think people appreciated that, depending on the time of year, he would be doing the same for cricket.”

Evans was also the founder, owner, presenter and commentator of Scottish Rugby TV, which provided high quality coverage of the club game for a number of years in the late 2000s and early 2010s – providing that tier of the game with an important profile boost at a time when it was struggling to find its place in the new professional order.

He is survived by his sons, Greg and Glynn, and his mother who celebrated her 100th birthday last year.